Essay One for 100 Points Based on Choosing One of the Following Options
Option 1
In the context of Gottschall’s The Professor in the Cage, develop an argumentative thesis about the relationship between masculinity and ritualized violence. Your essay should be 1,000 words and have a Works Cited page with 3 sources, including one from the El Camino College database.
Option 2
Support, refute, or complicate the assertion that Steve Almond's "The NFL Is Morally Reprehensible" is a compelling argument against Gottschall's case that ritualized violence is a natural and essential part of masculinity.
One. What is one of the central controversies of the book?
Here lies the debate in Gottschall’s book. A lot of sociologists, such as Allan G. Johnson, criticize the biology model of gender differences, arguing that the biology model is false and born out of the need to service patriarchy, a male-dominated society. Critics such as Johnson argue that gender differences and gender roles are social constructions.
Gottschall would disagree. He argues that masculinity, the need to fight and to pump up in the gym, is a biological need in order to obtain power. If we don’t obtain this power, he argues, we get pushed around.
At one point, Gottschall (JG) argues with “the poet” about masculinity. He says to the poet: “Can you name a single society in world history where physical strength wasn’t part of the masculine ideal?”
He continues: “We didn’t invent masculinity. It’s not a cultural thing. It’s not even a people thing. Watch an alpha chimp or a silverback gorilla strut around. They’re macho!”
And then ironically, JG and the poet had a “masculine ritual” of arguing back and forth to see who’s right rather than come to a mutual understanding, a point JG makes to prove his argument.
JG argues all males seek masculine power: “The big get their way, while the small give way.” This is the Law of the Jungle. To call this law a product of socialization or cultural patriarchy or media brainwashing is too ignore the evidence.
Two. How is prison a microcosm of society at large?
JG writes: “As in prison, strength equals respect in its most basic dimension: when you are strong, guys don’t f*** with you. . . . Bullies and criminals aren’t looking to test themselves in fair fights. So young men bulk up on the weights for many reasons. They want to look good. They may want to improve in sports. But they are also building up an arsenal of deterrence. Muscle is a bold advertisement: I am not a rabbit. I am not food.”
Three. What school of thought disagrees with JG’s argument that masculinity is biological?
We read that “For about a half a century academic thinking about gender has been guided by the theory of the ‘sex/gender system.’”
Sex is biological, but gender is learned, according to this theory. In other words, there is a strong dividing line between sex and gender.
As we read: “But gender—all of the attributes we typically describe as ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’—is purely cultural. We all emerge into the world as genderless blobs that parents, media, and teachers torture into culturally appropriate shapes. The act of taking the soggy mass of human raw material and mashing it into a rigid gender mold has been called ‘boying’ and ‘girling.”
JG rejects the above notion, mainly because science shows that males are more hardwired than females in two ways: “competitive and violent behavior.”
You can talk to parents, and they will tell you boy toddlers are more aggressive than female toddlers, for example.
Much of JG’s book is a rejection of the sex/gender dichotomy. He writes: “the basic masculine and feminine traits—male more competitive and aggressive, females more peaceable and nurturing—extend across diverse animal species. Over the past few decades biologists have determined that masculinity and femininity are rooted in something very simple: how fast the two sexes can reproduce. . . .”
Men are in competition with other men for reproductive success, and this competition starts early.
We read: “This competition to attract mates and defeat rivals is what Darwin called sexual selection. And in males the suite of features shaped by generations of consistent high-risk, high-reward competition for mates is what we call masculinity. As Darwin indicated, these features consist of being bigger, stronger, more bellicose, more willing to take risks, and more sexually eager” (72).
Masculinity has a biological purpose. We read: “Put baldly, this means that masculinity has an overriding purpose. Whether in men or musk oxen, masculinity is for prevailing in the competition for mates. It’s about being big and fierce enough to win fights, or to intimidate a rival into yielding without a fight.”
Four. What intellectual traps must we avoid when contemplating biological explanations for gender?
We must not equate the biological template of a male—aggressive, ruthlessly competitive, risk-taking—with an ideal of behavior. Nor must we equate this behavior with morality.
One man could embody masculine behavior and be a complete jackass. In contrast, another man could embody masculine behavior and be honorable and noble.
One thing is clear: Unleashing our male animal does not make us ideal or moral. Cultivating our masculinity with the harness of morality and honor is the only way.
Lots of “bros” or macho men or he-men are obnoxious braggarts, reckless troglodytes, and are on the road to self-destruction.
We must not read JG’s argument as an argument in favor of “jackass masculinity.”
There’s another danger. Not all women are attracted to macho bros. Some are, to be sure. But some women are attracted to shy bookish nerds. Some shy bookish nerds didn’t date in high school while the macho bros “got all the girls.” But ten, fifteen years down the road, the macho bros are working dead-end jobs, are unemployed, are in prison, are possibly dead. Some of the bookish nerds on the other hand might be in healthy relationships and running computer companies.
In other words, let us not glorify the unbridled macho bro.
Having masculine traits is good to a certain degree, but not if we become inconsiderate, rude, belligerent beasts.
We are not gorillas. Male gorillas are twice as big as female gorillas because they are “a harem-holding species.” Men do not hold harems in modern American society, last I checked.
Five. How does JG chronicle his own conflict with community and isolation?
JG makes a connection between masculinity and community: Men are judged by communal standards and enter rites of passages to be held in esteem and find belonging in their communities.
As a suburbanite living isolated in the suburbs, teaching college course, writing in isolation, and haunted by demons of masculine self-doubt, JG lives a lot in his head, isolated from those communal bonds that would him a sense of belonging, acceptance, and validation.
In this state of self-doubt, he longs for a way to prove his masculinity to himself and to others.
His crisis of self-worth is universal.
Many men find escape from their sense of domestic and masculine ineptitude by watching sports.
Television dramatizes men trying to regain their self-worth. Most famously, Breaking Bad, featuring Walter White, is about an effete chemistry teacher who becomes “The Danger.”
JG feels “soulless and emasculated” in his adjunct professor office. He’s been “man-dumped” by his friend.
He wants to get fired as a professor. He observes that the English Department is a feminized environment.
He wants to be a bad boy MMA fighter. He thinks being a bad boy will afford him the masculinity he craves.
He punches his poet friend Nobu, a long-time martial arts practitioner, at a party.
Six. What “man crisis” does JG chronicle in his book?
Perhaps American society offers too few healthy rituals to affirm masculinity. On page 82, we read that men are hungry for masculine qualities: “bravery, toughness, stoicism” and “we invent our own dragons” like Don Quixote to test ourselves.
The “dragon” could be an MMA fight, a bodybuilding competition, saving up for a Mustang GT, finding some trophy or other, getting a UCLA degree, getting a six-pack of abs, developing a hand-crushing handshake by exercising the hands with Captains of Crush Hand Crushers.
JG points out that YouTube is rife with crazy videos of men doing dares.
Men crave high-risk activities and simulated combat, so that they are drawn to wrestling and “combat” games. In contrast, JG observes that women are drawn to different, non-physical warfare, battles of cunning, deceit, and other Machiavellian methods. For JG, this difference is biological, not social.
Arguments against JG's book to consider:
One. His book may have some truth in genetic hardwiring of males, but it's too extreme. Socialization is a factor also. For example, it used to be essential to one's manliness and honor to engage in a duel, but this suicidal ritual is now extinct due to socialization. Manly codes don't require that men engage in duels.
Two. JG's book encourages stereotypes. Males and females break out of rigid role expectations all the time. JG's book desires to reinforce gender stereotypes.
Three. JG is too emotionally involved in the subject to see that his own masculine insecurity drives his argument, not facts. In other words, JG should not take an individual crisis and try to make a general principle about it. Perhaps another man with an identity or self-worth crisis would empower himself, not through MMA training, but by playing piano, guitar, or working on his tennis serve.
Four. JG draws on a lot of truth but perhaps exaggerates his claims. Perhaps he's not wrong absolutely but by degree.
Five. JG's book is a misreading of his life. He's not suffering a masculinity crisis, as he likes to believe. Rather, he is suffering from a meaning of life crisis--a crisis about a man who lacks purpose.
Reviews:
Critique posted on Kung Fu Tea blog.
